Saturday, February 27, 2010

The USC publication Neon Tommy asked for an op-ed on engaging Iran in public diplomacy. I could have written a whole book on the subject. But here is the cliff notes version;This month Iran celebrated the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. Along with it came another significant anniversary. Thirty-one years ago U.S.-Iranian relations collapsed.

The first blow to U.S.-Iran relations occurred in 1953 when the CIA staged a coup d'état in Iran, ousting the first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. In his stead, the U.S. installed the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Iranians overthrew the Shah in 1979. A group of Islamist students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran taking 53 Americans hostage for 444 days. These events resulted in the dissolution of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Haiti, Iran, Congo, SriLanka.. so many important events are going on around the world, that even a news junkie such as myself has a hard time keeping up. As this new documentary points out, "Americans' attention span for global crises is usually very short." And with 15 second clips about these extremely complicated and intractable conflicts wedged among stories of Michael Jackson and Jon & Kate (and of course their eight), how can we blame people for not knowing what's going on outside of their realities- or for getting easily frustrated and overwhelmed when they try to understand. We could go into a debate about who is at fault for this, the media or the audience. I won't do that here, but this documentary, "Reporter," by filmmaker Eric Metzgar talks about how important journalists, such as Nicholas Kristof, battle with this short attention span in order to tell the stories of these conflicts. They also discuss Kristof's tendencies towards afro-pessimistic reporting, which is another interesting debate. The entire documentary premiers on HBO February 18th.